Critical Notice: David Bloor's Knowledge and Social Imagery (Second Edition)

Abstract

When Bloor's Knowledge and Social Imagery was first published in 1976, it was not the first time that a “strong programme” in the sociology of knowledge was treated to a hostile reception by philosophers. But never before has such a dialectically unproductive encounter with philosophers led to such a methodologically fruitful response, for, when an array of positivist, historicist, Popperian, and realist philosophers argued against Bloor and his Edinburgh colleagues that normative accounts of scientific rationality could not be refuted by empirical accounts of what scientists do (see Brown 1984), an entire line of research was launched that sought to explain science without having to make reference to the philosophers' cherished norms. This is the field now known as Science and Technology Studies (STS). Although STS is normally taken to be intellectually centered in sociology, its main practitioners are just as likely to have been drawn from philosophy and the natural sciences (as in the case of the original Edinburgh School) as from the social sciences proper. The unmistakable mark of Bloor's influence is that, unlike the sociology of science most recognizable to sociologists (e.g., Merton 1973), the STS practitioner is committed to studying science in the same spirit of analytic detachment and epistemic neutrality as she would any other aspect of society. In practice, this has amounted to a preference for methods that incorporate “ethnographic distance” (e.g., Latour and Woolgar [1979] 1986), although in recent years theoretical debate has increasingly focused on the appropriate attitude that STS practitioners should adopt toward science, given their findings to date (see Pickering 1992, Fuller 1992b). I will return to this debate at the end of this essay.